AP 0877: How Much Should I Charge for a Kindle Ebook on Amazon?

AskPat 877 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey everybody, what's up? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 877 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question coming in today from Cathy, but before we get to her question I do want to thank today's sponsor which is ZipRecruiter. So if you're doing any hiring of any kind, you know one of the biggest pains is going out there and putting that job description out to all the different places. I mean, there's hundreds of places to put those things at. And then you have to manage all those calls that come in or the emails that come in. It's just really cumbersome, which is why ziprecruiter is here to help. In one interface, with just a couple clicks you can send out your job description to hundreds, a hundred plus different websites in social media channels and everywhere. And what's really cool is ZipRecruiter manages that process for you with that dashboard. So instead of having to manage all those calls and emails coming in, it's all handled through ZipRecruiter and you don't have to worry about the process of looking for the right people. You can just find the right candidates for your position and you can work to do that through ZipRecruiter. I would highly recommend it. It's one of the top recommended resources here on AskPat. I've gotten so many emails about it and I highly recommend you check it out. And get this, you can use it for free. You guys who are listening to this, all you have to do is go to ZipRecruiter.com/pat, again that's ZipRecruiter.com/pat. You'll be able to check it out.

All right, thanks so much. And how here's today's question from Cathy.

Cathy Mazak: Hi Pat. My name is Cathy Mazak and I have a website at CathyMazak.com where I teach students and new professors who want to publish more and advance their academic publishing careers. I'm working on an ebook that I'm hoping to put on Amazon as a Kindle book because I know that Amazon is a search engine and it's a place that my audience definitely hangs out and is searching. My question is, does it make a difference whether I put it there for free or charge what seems to be a really nominal amount—like $1.99, $2.99, $3.99—that I often see for Kindle books on Amazon. So that's my question. Thank you so much for all that you do: Yours is the podcast I can't live without. Have a great day!

Pat Flynn: Hey Cathy, thank you so much for the question today, I really appreciate it. Congrats on the upcoming ebook. So what should you charge on Amazon? Well there's a number of different ways to go about it. A lot of people, they charge sort of the maximum amount that you should be charging for a Kindle book and that is about $9.99. And what that does is it gives you the most profit. Now if you go above that, because of the way that Amazon's pricing structure is scheduled (at least at the time of this recording), you're gonna actually make less for a little bit, because of the royalty structures. And I'm not going to go into that right now, but you will make 70 percent of what you earn, 30 percent will go to Amazon. If you're anywhere between the $2.99 range and the $9.99 range, after that they start taking 70 percent and you keep 30 percent, so that's kind of how it works. And it's kind of interesting that they do that, right? And like, why would they change it so drastically? It's because they want to control the general pricing of books that are for Kindle. And so that's why it's like that, because they want to keep it between that sort of $1.99, $2.99 mark, and the $9.99 mark.

Obviously, if you have a paperback book you could charge more. And then there's the Audible version or the audio book version . . . you can manage that process at ACX.com which I do for my books. And that's great too, actually, I make more profit from the Audible books more than anything actually, now that I've had a year or so of data behind it.

Now, when it comes to the Kindle books and the pricing, I mean, that's really up to you. I wouldn't give it away for free. You can do that in a smart way during certain time periods as a promotion though. That's why I would charge a price, at least $1.99, I would go much higher if possible before that $9.99 mark. And obviously there's some perceived value there with your book as well. If it's only you know, $1.99, what does that mean versus if it's actually $4.99? And yeah, it's kind of not much of a difference; it's only $3.00 difference. But it does play a role if people are used to buying Kindle books, you know—that perceived value that is there now. So I'm not going to tell you what price is right. It depends on kind of what you want to do with it.

But the reason why I would charge something and not go free is because you can enroll in what's called KDP Select, so Kindle Direct Publishing Select, which means that the only requirement is that you cannot sell the book anywhere else for 90 days. But during those 90 days, you can do countdown promotions, meaning you can charge a lower price for a short period of time and every day the price goes up until it gets back to the original price again. Another advantage of starting high is you can offer these discounts at specific time periods, or you can choose to have it be free for a certain time period which is also a great strategy. If you're charging for a book on Kindle, you can go free for a short time period just to get a mad rush of people in there if your goal is indeed to get to as many people as possible. That's a great way to go about it too. If it's always free, then you know it's hard to push any sort of promotion behind it.

So that's why I would charge and you know . . . is there a difference between $2.99 and $3.99? No, not much but you might want to experiment with that. Plus what's really cool is you can always change the price point and just test and see what happens. So yeah, Cathy, I'm not going to tell you exactly what the price point is for you, but those are some things that you can know about it and hopefully it will work out for you.

So thanks Cathy, I appreciate you and I look forward to hearing more about how that goes for you. I also want to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much, I appreciate you, and you guys . . . we're almost done with May. So, looking forward to June and also here's a quote to finish off the day by Abraham Lincoln. He says, “He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help.” Take care and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.